The idea behind vitaphone existed for many years, but the biggest problem was, how to project the sound. Theater actors and opera singers could provide higher sound levels, than what an acoustic phonograph could do.
2:44 - "Oh, but Jack, dear, I'm all alone and, uh . . . Oh, I just . . . ." 3:12 - "Oh, well, Jack dear. If you put it as charity." There. I just captioned the "inaudable" (sic) parts. They had the technology to make these, but not the electronic amplifiers to show them in a theater and make them heard. They were played on a device called a Kinestograph -- a Kinetoscope with a wax cylinder phonograph to provide the sound -- which allowed for one viewing for one person. The sound was reproduced with headphones that resembled stethoscopes. (Just imagine watching and listening to this in 1913 when they started shouting at each other at 3:28.) Love the synchronizing pop at 0:05 PS: It's spelled "inaudible."
Who knew synchronized sound for motion pictures was available in 1913? I guess there were other attempts to give voice to the movies prior Warner Brothers introduction of the Vitaphone system in 1927. One notable example that comes to mind Is Phonophone and its demonstration of a higher fidelity recording with President Coolidge giving a speech.
Edison's team synchronized phonograph and kinetograph in the 1890s. They made a sound movie of two men dancing together while a third plays the violin; there's also one of men hammering at an anvil.
The ingredients existed. The biggest problems were, how to bring picture and sound in synch and how to bring it to larger audiences. Recorded sound was possibly loud enough for few people in a small living room, but not really for larger audiences, as usual in theaters and movies. So live performed music was the only way to break the silence of the silents.
Aside from the primitive recording techniques, the major drawback was that there was no way of amplifying the sound for a theater at the time. That wasn't possible until Dr. Lee deForest developed the Vacuum Tube, which was essential to all all sound equipment of the day.
When this film was made my grandparents were children and my great grandparents in early middle age. World War I hadn't started and the world seemed much different. For films, D.W. Griffith hadn't made "The Birth of a Nation" yet and this film is performed and viewed very much as a contemporary stage skit or scene from a play by a traveling show. The actors are playing to an audience, not the camera. They and the director clearly don't know much about how to use the medium yet. Very interesting. For me personally interesting as shortly after this was made my great grandmother in LA took her large brood of children, as did many other locals, to the new studios to be extras in the new crowd scenes, starting my grandmother in a brief film career as an acteess. Thanks.
The irony is, these actors in in this 1913 early experimental video/audio technology demonstration, appear to be superior voice actors compared to the relatively poor actors of the Silent movie era of the late 1910s to 1927. The Silent Era actors were not required to have good voices or voice inflections etc....they simply needed to make facial expressions of sadness, happiness, dismay, anger, energy, exhaustion, joy etc. So, when sound became feasible and was perfected for film by 1928, most of the Silent era stars lost acting work and fell off the map. Many of them were so despondent, that they took their own lives in the late 1920s and 1930s. The Great Depression also didn't help. Btw, while it was very impressive that sound-on-film technology was developed years prior to 1913, the technology was still in its infancy. This video was one in which the actors recorded their vocals separately first. And then they filmed this short afterward, with the actors lip-syncing what they previously recorded...also, the audio they recorded was played during filming, to help the actors with the lip-syncing. Then the director/editor combined the video with the separately recorded audio afterwards. So, what we're seeing here are the actors lip-syncing. Anyway, that entire process was very time-consuming and expensive, which was among the reasons why the movies didn't yet gravitate towards adopting the tech until a better method was developed --- one in which video and audio could be captured at the very same time on the very same recording device.
I had read in histories that Edison made attempts to synchronize an acoustic phonograph to a motion picture but this is the first example I've ever seen. Its quite remarkable and far ahead of its time. The quality of both sound and picture is outstanding. Its hard to believe its acoustical and not electrical recording. Thank you so much for posting this.
This sounds to me like electrical recording. You can watch at CZcams the Edison sound movies from the 1890s, with acoustic recording, such as the one of the two men dancing while the third plays a violin.
it's so interesting hearing people talk before the advent of the trans atlantic accent. they sound alot closer to how americans sound now than they dud in the 1930s and 40s. very interesting.
I don’t know if it is did you know enhancement or what, but lately when I see these old videos they seem unusually clear, it’s not just The clarity it’s also a sense of that they don’t seem as removed as they used to but it’s a very intangible feeling.
The Conduit when you look at film projected it looks like what we call HD the reason old stuff doesn’t look as good is because we were scanning it in low res. Now we can scan the film in 8k and it looks great.
Part of the major reason why old films seem clearer is because now, with awareness of film preservation and more advanced techniques, old films are being properly re-mastered, often from the original camera negative (as is the case here) or from pristine early prints. The closer to the original film you get, the better the quality of the image. A perfect example is when the 1956 version of War of the Worlds was released on DVD (and later blue ray) the wires holding the Martian machines suddenly became plainly visible. This is because modern film scanning allows us to see things on the original film itself in such resolution which would not have been seen by an audience at the time. In the case of WOTW, the wires were always there, but film stock and projection techniques were such that in 1956, they would not have been visible. Even when released on VHS tape, the 480p resolution of VCRs and TVs didn't show the wires as clearly as digital scanning and hi-res monitors. So it is with these century-old Kinetephones. You can almost see the texture in the clothing, the surface of the paintings, even individual strands of hair. The remastered sound reveals more fidelity than an audience of 1913 would ever have heard.
@@IAmJimRetzer no, don't even try to do that. Do no speak for that era and speak for what that audience heard, and do your basic take of inhumanizing the era while your at whatever nonesense you're trying to deduce. All you people do is take brilliant things from a time you were never from, and try to make them seem invaluable and lesser to what they are; often unapologetic about it too. I'm sure the audience heard it perfectly clear and it should do you well to not go into a film choosing to use high horse terming and entitlement. Shame. You leave people unimpressed by putting a narrative you don't even know is true or not, can't just let wonderful things exist back then...has to have a gentle critique by some dope!
Both the clarity of the film and the acoustic sound come as a surprise. Turning to one of the actor's Mr. Housman who plays the tall friend of the host Jack. Here he is aristocratic and confident. But after growing a moustache, sadly he went on in both silent and sound particularly, to play falling down drunks. It became his trademark in casting, and judging by his rapid aging, a problem in real life.
@Jack Morrison You don’t know whether or not Mr. Housman became a heavy drinker in his offscreen life. He can not speak for himself. A book about him does not exist.
Well, there was the live voices-behind-screen-technique in which actors would do provide voices for the characters on screen, some are even doing it right now!
wow ! thats Arthur Housman the comedian ,who many years later worked with laurel and Hardy, al jolson, the 3 stooges specializing in playing Drunks......
This file was stolen from the Undercrank DVD of all eight of the surviving Kinetophone films that we restored at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The DVD both looks and sounds much better than this.
Yeah this is in Public Domain. What’s wrong with sharing a clip of history? It’s not like I uploaded the entire DVD. And of course there will be quality loss when you upload to CZcams. No one ever said this was the definitive source for this footage. It’s a unique clip and it’s worth sharing to people who might not be interested enough in buying the entire DVD.
@@2ndAccountRiehl This is not a clip, it's the whole film. Dozens of restoration hours went into what's seen here, and still more work went into my label's DVD release of this film, done in collaboration with the Library of Congress, that you've ripped and uploaded. The best way to support the work and to point fans toward the disc release would be to upload just a *clip* from the film and not the whole thing, and to at least acknowledge the source in the description.
Ben Model - Ben Model - I did though. There is an amazon link to the DVD in the description, and while it’s an entire film, it’s not the entire DVD, and besides that everyone who created the film and appeared in it is dead. It’s just a low quality CZcams video, I’m not remarketing the DVD, obviously the DVD is going to offer much better quality, I really don’t understand what you think I’m trying to get away with. Saying I stole this film is very extreme.
Bizarre to see a talking film from 1913! When Chaplin was just starting out. And sound didn’t become the industry standard until the late 20s.
They have to find ways to project the sound as big as the picture and from the same medium. And also to edit sound the same way, as the footage.
Amazing for 1913. It may have been restored and cleaned up, but the fact that this was created 14 years prior to the Vitaphone is intriguing.
The idea behind vitaphone existed for many years, but the biggest problem was, how to project the sound. Theater actors and opera singers could provide higher sound levels, than what an acoustic phonograph could do.
Nice to see a young Arthur Housman here, long before he was typecast as a comic drunkard in the 1930's.
Thank you for noting Housman's participation here. I didn't recognize him at first! I know him from his Laurel and Hardy films!
2:44 - "Oh, but Jack, dear, I'm all alone and, uh . . . Oh, I just . . . ."
3:12 - "Oh, well, Jack dear. If you put it as charity." There. I just captioned the "inaudable" (sic) parts.
They had the technology to make these, but not the electronic amplifiers to show them in a theater and make them heard. They were played on a device called a Kinestograph -- a Kinetoscope with a wax cylinder phonograph to provide the sound -- which allowed for one viewing for one person. The sound was reproduced with headphones that resembled stethoscopes. (Just imagine watching and listening to this in 1913 when they started shouting at each other at 3:28.) Love the synchronizing pop at 0:05
PS: It's spelled "inaudible."
Thank you for pointing all of this out before I could!
Who knew synchronized sound for motion pictures was available in 1913? I guess there were other attempts to give voice to the movies prior Warner Brothers introduction of the Vitaphone system in 1927. One notable example that comes to mind Is Phonophone and its demonstration of a higher fidelity recording with President Coolidge giving a speech.
Edison's team synchronized phonograph and kinetograph in the 1890s. They made a sound movie of two men dancing together while a third plays the violin; there's also one of men hammering at an anvil.
Here it is, from 1894 or 1895: czcams.com/video/zaSrPUCFryU/video.html
The ingredients existed. The biggest problems were, how to bring picture and sound in synch and how to bring it to larger audiences. Recorded sound was possibly loud enough for few people in a small living room, but not really for larger audiences, as usual in theaters and movies. So live performed music was the only way to break the silence of the silents.
Amazing that they actually bow at the end! Obviously movies were still very informed by plays. Great find.
Yeeees the pronunciation and expressions is what we were taught in drama class. Amazing 🥰🥰
This was made before WW1 and I still found it hilarious!
Aside from the primitive recording techniques, the major drawback was that there was no way of amplifying the sound for a theater at the time. That wasn't possible until Dr. Lee deForest developed the Vacuum Tube, which was essential to all all sound equipment of the day.
When this film was made my grandparents were children and my great grandparents in early middle age. World War I hadn't started and the world seemed much different. For films, D.W. Griffith hadn't made "The Birth of a Nation" yet and this film is performed and viewed very much as a contemporary stage skit or scene from a play by a traveling show. The actors are playing to an audience, not the camera. They and the director clearly don't know much about how to use the medium yet. Very interesting. For me personally interesting as shortly after this was made my great grandmother in LA took her large brood of children, as did many other locals, to the new studios to be extras in the new crowd scenes, starting my grandmother in a brief film career as an acteess. Thanks.
What films was she in? Do any survive?
The irony is, these actors in in this 1913 early experimental video/audio technology demonstration, appear to be superior voice actors compared to the relatively poor actors of the Silent movie era of the late 1910s to 1927. The Silent Era actors were not required to have good voices or voice inflections etc....they simply needed to make facial expressions of sadness, happiness, dismay, anger, energy, exhaustion, joy etc. So, when sound became feasible and was perfected for film by 1928, most of the Silent era stars lost acting work and fell off the map. Many of them were so despondent, that they took their own lives in the late 1920s and 1930s. The Great Depression also didn't help.
Btw, while it was very impressive that sound-on-film technology was developed years prior to 1913, the technology was still in its infancy. This video was one in which the actors recorded their vocals separately first. And then they filmed this short afterward, with the actors lip-syncing what they previously recorded...also, the audio they recorded was played during filming, to help the actors with the lip-syncing. Then the director/editor combined the video with the separately recorded audio afterwards. So, what we're seeing here are the actors lip-syncing. Anyway, that entire process was very time-consuming and expensive, which was among the reasons why the movies didn't yet gravitate towards adopting the tech until a better method was developed --- one in which video and audio could be captured at the very same time on the very same recording device.
Hopefully r/Obscuremedia gives this some views this is a gem.
Here from the subreddit :D
That's where I found it!
@@TheHauntedDriveIn and world continues to turn. Goodonya
I think it is funny they refer to seeing movies being good for a deaf person because there is no sound but in this there is.....
I had read in histories that Edison made attempts to synchronize an acoustic phonograph to a motion picture but this is the first example I've ever seen. Its quite remarkable and far ahead of its time. The quality of both sound and picture is outstanding. Its hard to believe its acoustical and not electrical recording. Thank you so much for posting this.
This sounds to me like electrical recording.
You can watch at CZcams the Edison sound movies from the 1890s, with acoustic recording, such as the one of the two men dancing while the third plays a violin.
@@smadaf it is acoustic done with a giant horn.
it's so interesting hearing people talk before the advent of the trans atlantic accent. they sound alot closer to how americans sound now than they dud in the 1930s and 40s. very interesting.
Great observation!
I even second guessed if it was from 1913 😅😅 clear picture and no strange accent!
I don’t know if it is did you know enhancement or what, but lately when I see these old videos they seem unusually clear, it’s not just The clarity it’s also a sense of that they don’t seem as removed as they used to but it’s a very intangible feeling.
The Conduit when you look at film projected it looks like what we call HD the reason old stuff doesn’t look as good is because we were scanning it in low res. Now we can scan the film in 8k and it looks great.
Part of the major reason why old films seem clearer is because now, with awareness of film preservation and more advanced techniques, old films are being properly re-mastered, often from the original camera negative (as is the case here) or from pristine early prints. The closer to the original film you get, the better the quality of the image.
A perfect example is when the 1956 version of War of the Worlds was released on DVD (and later blue ray) the wires holding the Martian machines suddenly became plainly visible. This is because modern film scanning allows us to see things on the original film itself in such resolution which would not have been seen by an audience at the time. In the case of WOTW, the wires were always there, but film stock and projection techniques were such that in 1956, they would not have been visible. Even when released on VHS tape, the 480p resolution of VCRs and TVs didn't show the wires as clearly as digital scanning and hi-res monitors.
So it is with these century-old Kinetephones. You can almost see the texture in the clothing, the surface of the paintings, even individual strands of hair. The remastered sound reveals more fidelity than an audience of 1913 would ever have heard.
@@IAmJimRetzer no, don't even try to do that. Do no speak for that era and speak for what that audience heard, and do your basic take of inhumanizing the era while your at whatever nonesense you're trying to deduce. All you people do is take brilliant things from a time you were never from, and try to make them seem invaluable and lesser to what they are; often unapologetic about it too. I'm sure the audience heard it perfectly clear and it should do you well to not go into a film choosing to use high horse terming and entitlement. Shame.
You leave people unimpressed by putting a narrative you don't even know is true or not, can't just let wonderful things exist back then...has to have a gentle critique by some dope!
How I teresting to be able to listen and see these old movies with everyone on them already deceased !!!
Impressive these old films, sound quality is very clear too
Arthur Housman - the classic lush from Laurel & Hardy films!
Both the clarity of the film and the acoustic sound come as a surprise. Turning to one of the actor's Mr. Housman who plays the tall friend of the host Jack. Here he is aristocratic and confident. But after growing a moustache, sadly he went on in both silent and sound particularly, to play falling down drunks. It became his trademark in casting, and judging by his rapid aging, a problem in real life.
@Jack Morrison You don’t know whether or not Mr. Housman became a heavy drinker in his offscreen life. He can not speak for himself. A book about him does not exist.
Well, there was the live voices-behind-screen-technique in which actors would do provide voices for the characters on screen, some are even doing it right now!
My grandparents turned 20 in 1913
“Deaf as a doorknob”.. people STILL say that.
This is great--both because of its early release and its being funny!
Thank you for posting this!
Thanks, I really enjoyed this !
She agrees by saying "if you put it as charity, then I suppose I must."
Amazing!
sound in film, the jet engine for airplanes, what else came out the most in the 1910s?
So we can see, how theater was in the times, where talkies and recorded sound in movies was the exception.
Damn! This is amazing picture quality!
wow ! thats Arthur Housman the comedian ,who many years later worked with laurel and Hardy, al jolson, the 3 stooges specializing in playing Drunks......
I saw one of these large Blue Amberols at the Edison Ford winter home.
like wow...great Technology for the time...
Edison cylinder or disc I wonder? Surface noise is strange... could it be indented on film?
i think the maid says "mr jack", not just jack
Wow
Why, upon my word, it appeareth that this lad Jack beeth a sussy little baka, if I may say so myself!
Literally no one:
Pre-1920 audio: *SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS*
By Jove " Was this phrase common then?
Yes, in UK English.
Why are they yelling like they’re on stage?
So you would be able to hear it in the next century.
Huh.. I thought sound wasn't invented until the 1920s?
Havnt you heard Enrico Caruso?
@@sdfghgtrew No hehehe
This file was stolen from the Undercrank DVD of all eight of the surviving Kinetophone films that we restored at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The DVD both looks and sounds much better than this.
Stolen? This is in the public domain.
Yeah this is in Public Domain. What’s wrong with sharing a clip of history? It’s not like I uploaded the entire DVD. And of course there will be quality loss when you upload to CZcams. No one ever said this was the definitive source for this footage. It’s a unique clip and it’s worth sharing to people who might not be interested enough in buying the entire DVD.
I also wanted a chance to provide subtitles for the clip as well 🤷🏻♂️ I can’t do that on the DVD.
@@2ndAccountRiehl This is not a clip, it's the whole film. Dozens of restoration hours went into what's seen here, and still more work went into my label's DVD release of this film, done in collaboration with the Library of Congress, that you've ripped and uploaded. The best way to support the work and to point fans toward the disc release would be to upload just a *clip* from the film and not the whole thing, and to at least acknowledge the source in the description.
Ben Model - Ben Model - I did though. There is an amazon link to the DVD in the description, and while it’s an entire film, it’s not the entire DVD, and besides that everyone who created the film and appeared in it is dead. It’s just a low quality CZcams video, I’m not remarketing the DVD, obviously the DVD is going to offer much better quality, I really don’t understand what you think I’m trying to get away with. Saying I stole this film is very extreme.
Is that MARGARET DUMONT???!
I think it is !!!
*Am I being Pranked? If so, someone went to a lot of effort to simulate an old movie.*
What?
*I can't believe it looks so good for being so old.*@@ariasemusicaslegendadas7657
This is an example of why Tesla can't be compared to Edison. Old coil boy was a one-trick pony.
Why would you watch this when you could watch Dude Where's My Car? Cinema has come so far.
Or Borat 😅
looks fake...
Fortunately, they had the original camera negative which is why it looks so good.